Note: Many of our articles have direct quotes from sources you can cite, within the Wikipedia article!
In military terminology, an EMP bomb detonated hundreds of kilometers above the earth's surface is known as a high-altitude electromagnetic pulse (HEMP) device.
During the first United States nuclear test in 1945, electronic equipment was shielded due to Enrico Fermi's expectation of an electromagnetic pulse from the detonation. The high altitude nuclear tests of 1962, as described below, increased awareness of EMP beyond the original small population of nuclear weapons scientists and engineers. Starfish Prime was the first successful test in the series of United States high-altitude nuclear tests in 1962 known as Operation Fishbowl.
The EMP damage of the Starfish Prime test was quickly repaired because of the ruggedness (compared to today) of the electrical and electronic infrastructure of Hawaii in 1962.
The concept of the explosively pumped flux compression generator for generating a non-nuclear electromagnetic pulse was conceived as early as 1951 by Andrei Sakharov in the Soviet Union,[14] but nations have usually kept their most recent work on non-nuclear EMP highly classified until the technology was old enough for similar ideas to be conceived by physicists in other nations. The case of a nuclear electromagnetic pulse differs from other kinds of electromagnetic pulse (EMP) in being a complex electromagnetic multi-pulse. The E1 component is produced when gamma radiation from the nuclear detonation knocks electrons out of the atoms in the upper atmosphere.
The E2 component of the pulse has many similarities to the electromagnetic pulses produced by lightning. The E3 component of the pulse is a very slow pulse, lasting tens to hundreds of seconds, that is caused by the nuclear detonation heaving the Earth's magnetic field out of the way, followed by the restoration of the magnetic field to its natural place. The strongest part of the pulse lasts for only a fraction of a second, but any unprotected electrical equipment — and anything connected to electrical cables, which act as giant lightning rods or antennae — will be affected by the pulse.
Although vacuum tubes are far more resistant to EMP than solid state devices, other components in vacuum tube circuitry can be damaged by EMP. If the aircraft carrying the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs had been within the intense nuclear radiation zone when the bombs exploded over those cities, then they would have suffered effects from the charge separation (radial) EMP. Beyond a certain altitude a nuclear weapon will not produce any EMP, as the gamma rays will have had sufficient distance to disperse. The mechanism for a 400 km high altitude burst EMP: gamma rays hit the atmosphere between 20–40 km altitude, ejecting electrons which are then deflected sideways by the Earth's magnetic field. A high-altitude nuclear detonation produces an immediate flux of gamma rays from the nuclear reactions within the device. The pulse can easily span continent-sized areas, and this radiation can affect systems on land, sea, and air. The altitude indicated above is greater than that of the International Space Station and many low Earth orbit satellites. Typical nuclear weapon yields used during Cold War planning for EMP attacks were in the range of 1 to 10 megatons (4.2 to 42 PJ)[26] This is roughly 50 to 500 times the sizes of the weapons the United States used in Japan at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
A unique and important aspect of nuclear EMP is that all of the components of the electromagnetic pulse are generated outside of the weapon.
For high-altitude nuclear explosions, this means that much of the EMP is actually generated at a large distance from the detonation (where the gamma radiation from the explosion hits the upper atmosphere).
In other words, the electric field strength in the entire area that is affected by the EMP will be fairly uniform for weapons with a large gamma ray output; but for much smaller weapons, the electric field may fall off at a comparatively faster rate at large distances from the detonation point.
It is the peak electric field of the EMP that determines the peak voltage induced in equipment and other electrical conductors on the ground, and most of the damage is determined by induced voltages. Non-nuclear electromagnetic pulse (NNEMP) is an electromagnetic pulse generated without use of nuclear weapons. NNEMP generators can be carried as a payload of bombs and cruise missiles, allowing construction of electromagnetic bombs with diminished mechanical, thermal and ionizing radiation effects and without the political consequences of deploying nuclear weapons. The range of NNEMP weapons (non-nuclear electromagnetic bombs) is severely limited compared to nuclear EMP. A right front view of a Boeing E-4 advanced airborne command post (AABNCP) on the electromagnetic pulse (EMP) simulator (HAGII-C) for testing. Information about the EMP simulators used by the United States during the latter part of the Cold War, along with more general information about electromagnetic pulse, are now in papers under the care of the SUMMA Foundation,[35] which is now hosted at the University of New Mexico.
During the 2003 invasion of Iraq, others also have speculated that the United States military used a Tomahawk Missile with a non-nuclear electromagnetic pulse warhead on other Iraqi targets.
A widely-read article by engineer and defense analyst Carlo Kopp, first published in 1996, stated that suitable materials and tools to create basic non-nuclear electromagnetic weapons are commonly available.
Typical modern scenarios seen in large numbers of news accounts and opinion articles speculate about the use of nuclear weapons by rogue states or terrorists in an EMP attack. Some rogue states have developed an ability to deliver a light missile payload to the necessary altitude for an EMP attack. The United States EMP Commission was authorized by the United States Congress in Fiscal Year 2001, and re-authorized in Fiscal Year 2006. The United States EMP Commission has brought together a group of notable scientists and technologists to compile several reports. The EMP Commission sponsored a worldwide survey of foreign scientific and military literature to evaluate the knowledge, and possibly the intentions, of foreign states with respect to electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack. Many foreign analysts–particularly in Iran, North Korea, China, and Russia–view the United States as a potential aggressor that would be willing to use its entire panoply of weapons, including nuclear weapons, in a first strike. Russian and Chinese military scientists in open source writings describe the basic principles of nuclear weapons designed specifically to generate an enhanced-EMP effect, that they term "Super-EMP" weapons. In non-technical writings about nuclear EMP, both in print and on the Internet, some common misconceptions about EMP are nearly always found.
The E3 component of nuclear EMP that produces geomagnetically induced currents in very long electrical conductors is roughly proportional to the total energy yield of the weapon.
It has long been known that there are many ways to protect against nuclear EMP (or to quickly begin repairs where protection is not practical); but the United States EMP Commission determined that such protections are almost completely absent in the civilian infrastructure of the United States, and that even large sectors of the United States military services were no longer protected against EMP to the level that they were during the Cold War.
The scenario begins with a nuclear explosion in low earth orbit, at the distance of the International Space Station, above middle America. That means anything electronic that hasn’t been hardened is going to be ruined. That means your computers, TVs, cars, home electronics, breaker box, phones, radios, cell phones.
The only thing working are US conventional forces that happened to be hardened against EMP (which means quite a few of them). Some cars stored in underground parking garages would probably work depending on the proximity. We know this sort of thing because we have seen what happens during extended power outages.
International relief from Japan, China, Canada (though most of Canada is taken out too), Mexico, Europe begins but it’ll be slow going.
By now, most people in the subs have run out of food they would normally remotely consider eating. Meanwhile, the first container ships of relief have reached San Francisco, Seattle, LA, San Diego, Houston, Miami, Boston, NY, Washington, Raleigh.
The typical American family, now out of food and with no access to clean water is starting to get pretty desperate.
Millions of Americans are wishing they had put those steaks and hamburgers and hotdogs in their basements in the cooler temperatures. In the cities on the coast, power is restored via backup generators relatively close to shore. Meanwhile, armed thugs are starting to systematically go through every building and house looking and taking what they need.
At this point, martial law has been declared by any competent city government. Some cities decide that, for the public good of course, that all community food will be collected and distributed equally to everyone. A few people have managed to dig up old HAM radios and they are getting distant broadcasts of reassurance but it’s clear that nothing’s coming any time soon if you live significantly inland, especially if you don’t live in a densely populated area. A few older cars start showing up again on the roads as collectables and just old junkers are fixed up and are able to drive because they didn’t have electronics in them. Really large cities away from the coast are dead at this point. Sorry Omaha, there’s nobody home anymore. Now is when the death toll really starts to go up. First, you have about 5% of the population that was on medication to control their mental states. The number of deer left that are near people has diminished to the point of being difficult to find. Most cities of any decent size now have an outpost re-established with convoys of food now arriving. It’s during this second month that the food shipments to the United States are going to start to dry up as hunger starts to become a significant problem in China, Japan, and other countries that have to import food. It’s at about this time that those who were celebrating in the streets about the downfall of the great Satan are starting to get the first thought that yes, they’re going to die too.
In Japan, where starvation is a serious concern, they and Korea have enough money to pay top dollar for the dwindling import food supply.
If you’re on the East coast in a secure area, you’re in good shape. If you’re on the west coast, most of you are going to die.
The population of the United States is starting to take on the same appearance it did in 1909. Urban populations of the United States have had staggering death tolls, particularly those not near the coasts. Anyone requiring medication that needed to be refrigerated in order to live (anti-rejection drugs, insulin, various heart medications, for instance) has died. Another 10% in the south who are living in places that were uninhabitable without modern technology have died. Think LA is nice?
Power is starting to get restored due to generators and the government now had a decent supply of cars. I tell people who come and interview that Michigan’s southern part is about the same latitude as Northern California. Winters in the upper part of the United States and lower Canada aren’t that bad – if you have heat. By this point, restoring natural gas is not going to be a simple matter of restoring power. Ever wondered how natural gas gets to your house? It’s all repairable but it will take time and unfortunately, a lot of that expertise in people has died or is otherwise unavailable.
If you live in northern states at this point, and you haven’t starved to death, you’re probably going to start dying of exposure. But that’s a gift compared to what people still struggling to make it in warmer areas as we get reintroduced to cholera, TB, and diarrhea become major problems. On the west coast, food shipments have dropped to a trickle. LA, Seattle, San Fran, it’s not a fun time there now. The grid is re-established in the mid-west, the east coast, and much of the south. It’s partially re-established on the west coast thanks to help from South Korea, China, and Japan. So what’s the death toll? Conservatively, you’re looking at 40% of the population of the US and Canada has died. A smart (well not really smart because the states that sponsor terrorists have died off due to the unintended consequences) terrorist would have also zinged Japan, South Korea, the Chinese east coast, and western Europe. The population of the United States today is over 300 million people. In 1900 it was 76 million. Heck, how many Americans are simply living today because they have access to all kinds of medical technology? How many Americans are living in places that can only be inhabited thanks to modern technology?
It is important to have all of the computer data that is important to you backed up onto optical media, like CD or DVD. Paper printouts are fine, but after an EMP attack, most of the data on paper printouts will simply never get typed back into computers, so those paper printouts will just become your personal mementos. It is important to remember that the last time an automobile was actually tested against nuclear EMP was in 1962. Everything since then has been in simulators that we hope are close to the real thing. If the power grid goes down, I would not recommend being in a town of more than 500 population. There’s definitely going to be a public health crisis at the very least, if not a situation where the cities become absolutely unlivable very quickly – I’m talking within two weeks.
If we were to have the onset of a collapse in summertime we’d see a public health crisis very quickly.
It doesn’t take too long a period before blankets are insufficient – people don’t have any alternate source of heat they’ll be freezing to death in large numbers.

We could be in a situation where we literally could see a 90% die-off in the major metropolitan regions.
I highly recommend that if any of your listeners have the opportunity, if they’re self employed or if they can find employment, or if they’re retired, that they move to a lightly populated rural region that’s in a food producing area. But otherwise, in a grid down collapse that goes on for more than a year, we literally could see a 90% population loss in the big cities, and a 50% population loss in the suburbs and as much as a 40% loss in non-viable rural areas – I’m talking desert regions or other areas where there’s not a lot of agriculture that goes on. At the other end of the scale of EMP resistance are some really sensitive electrical parts. The only two requirements for protection with a Faraday box are: (1) the equipment inside the box does NOT touch the metal container (plastic, wadded paper, or cardboard can all be used to insulate it from the metal) and (2) the metal shield is continuous without any gaps between pieces or extra-large holes in it. Grounding a Faraday box is NOT necessary and in some cases actually may be less than ideal. WV SHTF Plan news“They Spent It All On Hookers, Blow And Fancy Toys” – Hedge Fund Manager Predicts Lower Oil For Longer, Quantitative Easing For The People, And A Gold Bull Market Sunday, March 6, 2016The debt will be amended, extended and then they'll pretend.
An EMP is usually damaging to most electronic equipment including household appliances, automobiles, power grids and communication systems. Naturally occurring EMP’s can be caused by lightning and from electrostatic discharges when two charged objects come in close proximity or by making contact. An EMP can be manmade, as well, and equipment designed to produce an Electromagnetic Pulse is generally used to target specific buildings, installations and equipment. Today an EMP is much more likely than say 50 years ago when nuclear technology was in its infancy stages. There is a belief that a long-term loss of electricity would put the world or a country back 150 years. No one today truly knows whether the world or a country can survive without electricity because no one alive today has ever had too.
Battery operated torches and radios will cease to work if they have an electronic circuit board in them. Aircraft can fail in flight because any navigational aids would be destroyed seconds after an EMP.
Literally, an Electromagnetic Pulse could mean aircraft would be falling from the skies causing untold numbers of fatalities. Prepare to live without electricity, which means you as an individual or family are on your own in the first few weeks, months or possibly years. An anodized aluminium rubbish barrel can be made into a shielding device by grounding it or even burying it so the lid is at least a half of a meter under the soil. Place items in the barrel so they do not make contact with the sides. An Electromagnetic pulse will destroy computers, USB devices, hard drives and any device that has an electronic component in it.
Two-radios and ham radios are necessary so you and family members can keep in contact and possibly monitor for public information.
It is likely that most if not all mobile services will be disrupted but you simply do not know how long, so make sure you have the means to communicate if the damage to some systems can be repaired.
Charcoal or bottled gas is an option for cooking and gas can be used for heating in some cases but you will not be able to resupply.
Laundry and bathing will be a problem because of a limited water supply and not having the ability to heat water efficiently. An Electromagnetic Pulse will disrupt your life and the lives of everyone around you for weeks, months and possibly years. Testing electronic & electric circuitry's ability to withstand one of the fallout of a Nuclear detonation.
Nuclear electromagnetic bombs have three distinct time components that result from different physical phenomena. The official technical history for that first nuclear test states, "All signal lines were completely shielded, in many cases doubly shielded. The larger scientific community became aware of the significance of the EMP problem after a series of three articles were published about nuclear electromagnetic pulse in 1981 by William J.
The subsequent Operation Fishbowl tests gathered more data on the high-altitude EMP phenomenon. Realization of the potential impacts of EMP became more apparent to some scientists and engineers during the 1970s as more sensitive solid-state electronics began to come into widespread use. The geomagnetic storm-like E3 pulse (from the test designated as "Test 184") even induced an electrical current surge in a long underground power line that caused a fire in the power plant in the city of Karaganda.
The E1 component is a very brief but intense electromagnetic field that can quickly induce very high voltages in electrical conductors. The electrons travel in a generally downward direction at relativistic speeds (more than 90 percent of the speed of light).
Because of the similarities to lightning-caused pulses and the widespread use of lightning protection technology, the E2 pulse is generally considered to be the easiest to protect against. The E3 component has similarities to a geomagnetic storm caused by a very severe solar flare.[17][18] Like a geomagnetic storm, E3 can produce geomagnetically induced currents in long electrical conductors, which can then damage components such as power line transformers.
The B-29 aircraft that delivered the nuclear weapons at Hiroshima and Nagasaki did not lose power due to damage to their electrical or electronic systems. But this only occurs within the severe blast radius for detonations below about 10 km altitude.
In deep space or on worlds with no magnetic field (the moon or Mars for example) there will be little or no EMP. These photons in turn produce high energy free electrons by Compton scattering at altitudes between (roughly) 20 and 40 km. The first recorded EMP incident accompanied a high-altitude nuclear test over the South Pacific and resulted in power system failures as far away as Hawaii.
Because of the nature of the pulse as a large, long, high powered, noisy spike, it is doubtful that there would be much protection if the explosion were seen in the sky just below the tops of hills or mountains. Large weapons could have a dramatic impact on satellite operations and communications; smaller weapons have less such potential. In the thermonuclear Starfish Prime the fission yield was less than 100% to begin with, and then the thicker outer casing absorbed about 95% of the prompt gamma rays from the pusher around the fusion stage.
This causes the electric field from the EMP to be remarkably uniform over the large area affected. Within the range of gamma ray deposition, simple laws no longer hold as the air is ionised and there are other EMP effects, such as a radial electric field due to the separation of Compton electrons from air molecules, together with other complex phenomena. There are a number of devices that can achieve this objective, ranging from a large low-inductance capacitor bank discharged into a single-loop antenna or a microwave generator to an explosively pumped flux compression generator.
In that article, Kopp said, "The threat of electromagnetic bomb proliferation is very real."[30] Although Kopp's article mentions nuclear EMP, the article was mostly about non-nuclear EMP weapons.
Nuclear weapons in general have a much heavier missile payload, however advanced weapons design enables larger weapon yields with lighter weight.
In 2008, the EMP Commission released the Critical National Infrastructures Report.[28] This report describes, in as much detail as practical, the likely consequences of a nuclear EMP on civilian infrastructures. The survey found that the physics of EMP phenomenon and the military potential of EMP attack are widely understood in the international community, as reflected in official and unofficial writings and statements.
They perceive the United States as having contingency plans to make a nuclear EMP attack, and as being willing to execute those plans under a broad range of circumstances.
These widely-repeated misconceptions have led to a very considerable amount of confusion about the subject. As stated in the "History" section above, nuclear EMP from a nuclear air burst has been known since 1945. The other components of nuclear EMP are less likely to be dependent on total energy yield of the weapon.
The public statements of the physicists and engineers working in the EMP field tend to emphasize the importance of making electronic equipment and electrical components resistant to EMP — and of keeping adequate spare parts on hand, and in the proper location, to enable prompt repairs to be made.[18][28][47] The United States EMP Commission did not look at the civilian infrastructures of other nations.
It also means the power companies, their generators, the backup generators at hospitals, nursing homes, etc. In the country and in the suburbs, people take the food out of their refrigerators and freezers before it “goes bad” and have BBQs.
Of course, in those cases cars, cell phones, and other crucial devices still worked but there was still massive looting in the large cities. Food shipments can reach the coast in a couple of days but getting it inland will be a major problem as the vehicles will have to be transported in along with parts to try to get the railroads working again (along with teams to get dead trains off the rails). Looting at the local Wal-Mart and grocery stores begins as people simply take what they need.
In the south, tens of thousands have already died from heat. In 2003, when there was a heat wave in France, 14800 people died. Many have left the suburbs to head to rural areas where they think there is food (they’re wrong, harvest won’t happen for months, industrialized food processing involves a lot of transportation between the farms and the slaughter houses). Others are wishing they had salted them heavily and cooked them well done to store for the long haul. If your local law enforcement had a clue, they had already gotten themselves and helpful citizens around to the stores to gather up supplies to start rationing it. But word got around that you have supplies because you’re that guy who everyone knew was expecting to “bug out” one day when the government and black helicopters came. You might be able to take out a few people but 200+ Nope. This is now gone. They will mostly die off this month or take out a few others in the process. However, it’s starting to become a real problem because, well it turns out that the US and Canada supply a significant chunk of the world’s food.
The US and Canada make up 20% of the world’s food exports and if you count only basic foods the percentage nearly doubles. North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Egypt, Syria, Pakistan, and many other countries are about to see starvation on a level that has never been seen before. Western Europe, particularly Great Britain, Spain, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Netherlands are still sending food shipments.
Where does your water come from? Most of the population of Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico and parts of Utah have died. That’s probably a best case scenario if food and equipment shipments from the rest of the world come in quickly. If that happened, you would be looking far higher deaths everywhere as there would be no relief coming in. Our sterilized world has made us very vulnerable to the bacteria and viruses that lurk just outside our electrified civilization.
In one situation where the power grid stays up, you might do well in a city of five or ten thousand people.
Once you get past about 500 people, the group becomes unmanageable, especially with no radio communications and no phones to think that you can pull together as a community. Rawles points out the potential for “every man for himself” Mad Max scenarios as being likely outcomes in the event of a down grid. If it were to happen mid-winter we’d actually see more people dying of exposure, dying of the cold, than we would of dying of disease, especially in the Eastern United States and the North East.
Then you have a really big public health crisis because not only are you worried about human waste – you’re also worried about thousands upon thousands of unburied bodies. Ninety percent population loss and that’s just based on loss of the power grid alone, not counting the violence of people as food supplies dwindle, going from house to house taking what little is left – fighting over the scraps in effect.
Rawles’ estimation of a 90% die-off is right on target, as previously discussed in, Within One Year 9 Out of 10 Americans Would Be Dead. In the event of a true worst-case scenario, I refer to it as When the Schumer Hits the Fan, that’s going to be your safest place to be.
It’s believed that the electrical surge of the EMP from such an explosion would be strong enough to knock out much of the civilian electrical equipment over the whole country. In the levels created by a nuclear weapon, it would not pose a health hazard to plants, animals, or man PROVIDED it isn’t concentrated.

This includes large electric motors, vacuum tube equipment, electrical generators, transformers, relays, and the like. These include IC circuits, microwave transistors, and Field Effect Transistors (FET’s). If the object placed in the box is insulated from the inside surface of the box, it will not be effected by the EMP travelling around the outside metal surface of the box. To create an EMP over a large area an atmospheric nuclear detonation would be the logical choice. A solar storm will cause an electromagnetic disturbance and one large enough could cause widespread destruction of any country’s power grid. Today a few pounds of enriched plutonium launched into space on a satellite in place of its cameras would cause widespread devastation worldwide. However, keep in mind there was not any infrastructure to speak up 150 years ago, so people knew how to survive without electricity. Smaller aircraft can be flown without instruments, but many commercial jets and other aircraft rely on electronics to navigate. Dehydration will be a threat for many in a matter of days as well as starvation in the days after.
Place your items in the oven and place the oven near a metal water pipe and solder or otherwise connect a piece of copper wire from the microwave over to the water pipe to create a ground.
You will have to choose what devices to shield keeping in mind even though your device may have been spared it may not work because the power grid is not operational. Torches, mobile phones and other battery-operated devices along with the batteries should be shielded as well. The roadways will be clogged with stalled automobiles, so it is unlikely you could drive any significant distance even if your vehicle was operational. The thing you need to fear the most in some cases will be other humans once desperation sets in.
Most people rely on the village main for their water supply so you may not have running water. Begin now imagining how you will perform your daily tasks without the benefit of electricity and all of the modern day conveniences that make life easier. Any charge that is outside a totally sealed, no perforated box, will stay there until it discharges naturally, or is ground-bled after the pulse event.
Effects of an EMP device depend on the altitude of the detonation, energy yield, interactions with the earth's magnetic field, and shielding of targets. These new calculations, combined with the accelerating reliance on EMP-sensitive microelectronics, heightened awareness that the EMP threat could be a very significant problem. The E1 component causes most of its damage by causing electrical breakdown voltages to be exceeded.
This essentially produces a large pulse of electrical current vertically in the upper atmosphere over the entire affected area. This is simply because electrons (ejected from the air by gamma rays) are stopped quickly in normal air for bursts below roughly 10 km (about 6 miles), so they do not get a chance to be significantly deflected by the Earth's magnetic field (since the deflection causes the powerful EMP seen in high altitude bursts). These electrons are then trapped in the Earth's magnetic field, giving rise to an oscillating electric current. A large device detonated at 400–500 km (250 to 312 miles) over Kansas would affect all of the continental U.S. Thermonuclear weapons are also less efficient at producing EMP because the first stage can pre-ionize the air[21] which becomes conductive and hence rapidly shorts out the electron Compton currents generated by the final, larger yield thermonuclear stage. For a surface burst, absorption of gamma rays by air would limit the range of gamma ray deposition to approximately 10 miles, while for a burst in the lower-density air at high altitudes, the range of deposition would be far greater.
The effect of small e-bombs has proven to be sufficient for certain terrorist or military operations. It is impossible to know what kind of capabilities such terrorists might acquire, especially if they are aided by state sponsors with access to advanced technology.
It is difficult to know if any particular rogue state has the necessary combination of advanced missile technology and nuclear weapons technology to perform an effective nuclear EMP attack over an industrialized country. An offshore detonation at high altitude, by contrast, would present less technical difficulty and would disrupt both an entire coast and regions hundreds of miles inland (e.g. Although this report was directed specifically toward the United States, most of the information can obviously be generalized to the civilian infrastructure of other industrialized countries. The survey of open sources over the past decade finds that knowledge about EMP and EMP attack is evidenced in at least Britain, France, Germany, Israel, Egypt, Taiwan, Sweden, Cuba, India, Pakistan, Iraq under Saddam Hussein, Iran, North Korea, China and Russia. The unique characteristics of high-altitude nuclear EMP have been known since at least 1962. The E1 component, in particular, is proportional to prompt gamma ray output; but EMP levels can be strongly affected if more than one burst of gamma rays occurs in a short time period.
In the deep south, particularly Florida, there are a number of deaths due to the heat since air conditioning is out.
They didn’t lose power, they just didn’t have air conditioning. In Florida, the death toll is skyrocketing quickly.
You’re going to take a lot of them out but they’re going to come in, kill you, your family, and your supplies.
Kalamazoo Michigan, Santa Cruz California, and other cities of this kind are doing okay now as convoys are starting to show up. Third world countries usually have electricity and their inhabitants usually know how to start a fire. Do you know how to start a fire without matches and such? How many Americans live in places where they need an elevator, as a practical matter, to get to where they live?
I have a lot of faith in humanity. But when one considers the things that we worry about – global warming comes to mind, it amazes me how unconcerned people are at how easily disrupted our modern lives could be given how dependent we are on our technology today.
Whether you’re in the city or in rural parts of America you will either be the one looking for food and resources because you didn’t prepare, or you will be the one defending against Mad Max with a full belly and a self defense strategy. Thus, strategies based on using lightning arrestors or lightning-rod grounding techniques are destined to failure in protecting equipment from EMP. According to sources working at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, cars have proven to be resistant to EMP in actual tests using nuclear weapons as well as during more recent tests (with newer cars) with the US Military’s EMP simulators. These might even survive a massive surge of EMP and would likely to survive if a few of the above precautions were taking in their design and deployment.
If you have electrical equipment with such components, it must be very well protected if it is to survive EMP.
A rocket would be launched into space and the nuclear warhead would be detonated at a certain distance above the earth’s surface. However, while a solar storm of a large enough magnitude could very well destroy a large portion if not all of the world’s power grids it poses little threat to electronic gadgets, and will not disable automobiles, planes or trains.
Once damaged by a solar disturbance the worlds or any nation’s power grids would take years to repair if they could be repaired at all.
The effects would be greater as well because today everyone has an ever-increasing dependency on electricity. Therefore, a long-term outage would put us back half of a millennium or more because of our lack of knowledge on how to survive without electricity.
Hospitals and care centres will not be operational because backup generators will not operate, lifesaving equipment would soon be so much clutter under foot. Only those that can fly by dead reckoning without instruments would have a chance of landing safely.
Mobile and landline phones will not function and any hand-held communications devices unless properly shielded will not operate after an EMP.
You have to remember that any task you complete today using electricity will still have to be completed in the days after the power goes out.
This is a very rudimentary shielding method but can be used when no other materials are available. Bicycles can be used as well as small motorbikes such as a Vespas motor scooter to navigate around obstacles on the roadways. Once people realize there was an EMP, panic will ensue and the shops and other establishments will be looted quickly. Private water wells are one option if you have the means and property to have one dug or drilled and remember you will need to have hand water pumps installed. You can place water collection barrels to capture runoff but ensure the barrels are screened to filter out debris and prevent insect breeding. It will take planning so begin now learning what you need to do to survive without electricity. E1 is the component that can destroy computers and communications equipment and is too fast for ordinary lightning protectors. This current is asymmetric in general and gives rise to a rapidly rising radiated electromagnetic field called an electromagnetic pulse (EMP).
Hence, small pure fission weapons with thin cases are far more efficient at causing EMP than most megaton bombs.
Again: Other than on the coast (in some major cities near harbors anyway) you’ve heard and seen nothing from the government other than the occasional Black Hawk flying around. The runs killed more Americans than Heart disease, cancer, strokes, etc. And this November, it returns from retirement as people, without proper sanitation, start to die off from all kinds of things that were previously unheard of. Ditto with its use by terrorists should the technology to get such payloads into space become readily available to smaller countries and groups. Emergency services will be shut down as well, which means no law enforcement or emergency response to medical emergencies. The items protected should be nested inside the cage with Styrofoam or other plastic material without touching the metal walls. Because the electrons are trapped essentially simultaneously, a very large electromagnetic source radiates coherently. This multi-stage process is completed within a small fraction of a second, but it nevertheless requires a finite length of time. The grid is gone. There are spare parts but nowhere near enough to fix it all and because of the nature of the electrical grid, all the holes have to be plugged for the juice to flow again. And even if they had enough parts, how do they transport them? They were in pretty good conditions to get a fire going. You, by contrast, are wet, cold, weakened, and not sure if it’s even a good idea to start a fire because, well, what are you going to do with it?
Even though the plane, high over the earth, isn’t grounded it will sustain little damage. It is impractical to think you can store enough water in jugs to sustain you indefinably so you will have to develop alternative means of obtaining water. The E3 can run from 10 seconds to over a minute, depending on the weapon yield and alignment with magnetic fields. The first fission reaction is usually of relatively small yield, and the gamma rays produced by the first stage pre-ionize atmospheric molecules in the stratosphere.
The smart ones, who are able to, would have found their way to the harbors and waited for air lifts of food and such. Thus, to ensure functionality of systems used in such environment, they need to be suitably protected, normally achieved via radiation hardening & electromagnetic shielding.
Once done, such NEMP facilities, using non-nuclear source to generate the electromagnetic pulse [EMP], would be used to ascertain the efficacy of the process.
Sandwiched between two hostile countries in possession of Nuclear weapons, hardening the circuitry in the war-fighting machinery would be an primary requirement to ensure survivability. A critical test facility to aid indigenous military development programmes, those involving mobility platforms in this case, as suggested by locating it at VRDE.